What was refreshing about Buddhist practice for a recovering ex-Catholic was its comparative freedom from "belief anxiety", a profound institutional tension about orthodoxy that produced the damaging mindset that was also the means by which the official church secured its centralising, patriarchal power.

It was in the days of the cold war and on the cusp of the brief spring of Vatican II that I first became aware that Soviet and Roman Catholic intellectuals had something in common, namely the need to speak in code for fear of sanctions. I was increasingly aware, in those days, of the church's suppression of dissent, even the whiff of dissent. As I grew away from formal Christianity I realised that I was trying to shake off a related obsession with belief, a personal anxiety about orthodoxy, a terrible fear of error. The trouble was that there was so much to believe.

Conservative Catholics, I notice, still talk about what Catholics are required to believe, as though it were some kind of obligation of the faithful, straying from which was always a kind of spiritual and intellectual arrogance. This anxiety is worth exploring because it continues to haunt and distort Christianity in particular and because it depends upon a deformation of the already problematic concept of belief itself.

A dominant and distinctive theme of the Abrahamic traditions is the notion of a covenant and the related idea of the individual as a member of a community of "believers". But to be a believer in this sense was to occupy a role in a psycho-drama played out between Jehovah and his people. The role of believer required trust in God's promises and a reciprocating fidelity to his law. Thus you were identified in terms of your role; you were a believer to the extent that you stood by the covenant, believing in God's word and being faithful to his commandments.

All this has been taken literally, with terrible political consequences, or as a series of allegories and metaphors about how we should live in justice and harmony. But that is not the point here. It is easy to see how declaring that one did not believe in God would be construed as an act of infidelity, a rejection of God's law and a betrayal of a community which relied for its well-being on a solidarity of trust and commitment threatened by the temptation to seek out other gods. The atheist has become an infidel, even though he may share some of the moral values of justice and compassion, for instance, that are embedded in the religious discourse he rejects.

However, because there is such emphasis on being a believer in the Abrahamic traditions that idea has been conflated with the very idea of being religious at all and it is extended, quite unselfconsciously, to other religious traditions such as Buddhism and Taoism as though what all religious people have in common is that they are believers. But being a believer is only one kind of role among others, including being a pupil or disciple, or a seeker or a practitioner, roles which are also of course available within the Abrahamic traditions.

Being a believer in the Abrahamic sense, though, is a matter of an attitude and a relationship, and this is where the particular deformation I have in mind comes into play. A creeping propositional content manifested itself early on in the formation of Christianity. It is possible to make some good doctrinal sense of this, but the ground is treacherous. Theologians started to realise that more emphasis was being given to the idea of a propositional faith or belief than to an attitudinal one. The thought is that "faith" has, to some extent, degenerated into a kind of required assent, where the veracity of particular claims is supposedly secured by reference to trust in increasingly attenuated forms of authority. You trust God, right, and God says such and such, and then his son, Jesus, says …and then his vicar on earth says … And then the criterion of the strength of this trust becomes the conviction with which a person assents to the propositions – the resurrection, the virgin birth, the immaculate conception, etc – or pronounces the shibboleths that shows them orthodox "in matters of faith and morals".

In contrast, one would want to say that the strength of a person's attitudinal faith was shown in their courage and commitment to a course of action, a venture of the spirit. This discussion is a peculiar and distinctive aspect of the Abrahamic traditions, particularly of Christianity in those tumultuous credal controversies that accompanied the formation of the idea of orthodoxy and the corresponding idea of heresy. This emphasis on "belief" and its "mind-forg'd manacles" leaves the state of the individual unexamined … does secular humanism fare better?